Where we are
Moses 8 closes the Book of Moses and hands us off to the edge of the Flood. The Bible's Genesis 6 starts in the middle of a strange and famous sentence — "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives" — and centuries of readers have argued over what on earth it means. Moses 8 fills in the frame around it, and in doing so it does something this project has to be honest about: it takes the most famous apocryphal storyline in all of scripture and corrects it.
Because this is Genesis 6 — the giants, the sons of God, the wickedness that brings the Flood — and Genesis 6 is the beating heart of the ancient Enoch literature. If you've heard that apocryphal books "prove" Joseph Smith, this is the chapter where you'd expect the strongest borrowing. And what you actually find is more interesting than borrowing. Joseph had access to the famous reading, and he didn't take it. He gave a different one. That's worth slowing down for.
Three movements: Methuselah and the preserved covenant line (vv. 1–11); the sons-of-God crisis and Noah's preaching (vv. 12–24); and the grief before the Flood (vv. 25–30).
Methuselah, and the line that had to survive (verses 1–11)
Enoch's whole city went up to heaven — but not Methuselah. He "was not taken," the chapter says, "that the covenants of the Lord might be fulfilled… that Noah should be of the fruit of his loins" (v. 2). Someone had to stay behind. The covenant line ran through Methuselah, so he remained in the doomed world rather than ascend with the translated city. There's a quiet, hard lesson in that: faithfulness sometimes means staying with the suffering rather than being lifted out of it. Not everyone gets caught up to Zion. Some are kept back precisely because they're load-bearing.
And Methuselah "prophesied that all the families of the earth should be blessed" (v. 3) — which is the Abrahamic promise (Gen. 12:3), preached four hundred years before Abraham. That reframes the whole covenant. Abraham didn't originate the blessing of all nations; he inherited it, a promise already ancient by his day, running back through Methuselah and Enoch to Adam.
The sons of God — and the correction (verses 12–24)
Here is the famous crux:
And the Lord said unto Noah: The daughters of thy sons have sold themselves; for behold mine anger is kindled against the sons of men, for they will not hearken to my voice. — Moses 8:15
To feel what Moses 8 is doing, you have to know the reading it's pushing against. The oldest interpretation of Genesis 6 — the one preserved in 1 Enoch and hugely popular in the ancient world — is dramatic and strange: the "sons of God" are angels, heavenly Watchers who descended, lusted after human women, married them, and fathered a race of monstrous giants, the Nephilim. That's the famous version. It's vivid, it's ancient, and it was available to read in English in Joseph Smith's lifetime.
And Moses 8 doesn't take it. In the Restoration's reading, the "sons of God" aren't angels at all — they're the covenant line, the sons of Noah, called "sons of God" because of their priesthood and confirmation (remember Moses 6:68, "thus may all become my sons"). The "daughters of men" are women outside the covenant. The sin isn't angels mating with humans; it's the covenant line marrying out of the covenant and abandoning the faith of their fathers. The catastrophe is spiritual, not biological.
In the meantime Noah is out preaching, and what he preaches is, once again, the gospel by name:
Believe and repent of your sins and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, even as our fathers… and if ye do not this, the floods will come in upon you. — Moses 8:24
The same gospel Adam received and Enoch preached, now in Noah's mouth, with the name "Jesus Christ" spoken plainly before the Flood. And the people throw it back at him with a chilling little speech (vv. 20–21): "we are the sons of God… are we not eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage?" They claim the title and live like it means nothing. Jesus quotes that scene almost word for word as his picture of the last days — "as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage… and knew not until the flood came" (Matt. 24:38–39). The danger isn't dramatic wickedness. It's ordinary life lived as though the warning were a joke.
The old books on Genesis 6 — and the discrimination that matters
This is the chapter where the apocryphal method has to show it can say no.
I think Moses 8 is, quietly, one of the most important chapters for understanding what this whole project is and isn't claiming. The easy, sensational version of "apocrypha proves Joseph Smith" would have him adopting the giants-and-fallen-angels story, the most colorful thing in the ancient Enoch books — a story he could actually have read. Instead he does the harder, less flashy thing: he keeps what's true in the old picture (a world of giants and violence, swept away by a flood of judgment) and quietly throws out what isn't (angels breeding monsters with women). That's not the behavior of someone mining old books for material. It's the behavior the Restoration claims for itself — revelation that can stand next to the ancient texts and tell the gold from the dross. The genuinely buried witness, the Book of Giants, confirms the world Moses 8 describes. But the famous available one, Moses 8 corrects. Both facts point the same direction.
The grief before the Flood (verses 25–30)
The chapter ends in sorrow. The Bible's Genesis says "it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (Gen. 6:6) — a line that has troubled readers forever, because it seems to say God regretted his own creation. Moses 8 makes a careful change:
And it repented Noah, and his heart was pained that the Lord had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. — Moses 8:25
The grief gets relocated to Noah. And read alongside Moses 7, you can see why that's not a dodge but a deepening. Moses 7 already showed us, in full, that God genuinely weeps. So Moses 8 doesn't need to deny the divine grief — it shows the other half of it: the prophet's heart breaking in time with God's. Noah grieves the grief God grieves. The two hearts move together.
The Flood comes because "the earth is filled with violence" (v. 30) — chamas, the Hebrew for brutal, cruel violence. That's the precise charge. Not mere unbelief, not ritual failure: the world had become a place where people destroyed each other, exactly the thing that made God weep in Moses 7 ("they hate their own blood"). The two chapters close the same loop. And one small, hopeful note in the wreckage: Noah's three sons "walked with God" too (v. 27) — all of them, at this point, including Ham, who will fail later. Even at the end of a doomed age, the next generation still got to choose. The line was never on rails. It never is.
How this chapter changes the reader
Moses 8 closes the Book of Moses with a handful of things worth carrying out of it.
Your marriage choices are covenant choices. The chapter's whole reading of the Flood turns on a covenant people who stopped marrying within their faith and lost it within a generation. Strip away the giants and that's a sober, ordinary warning about how faith is kept or lost in families — not by dramatic apostasy, usually, but by the quiet drift of "marrying as they chose." Second, to grieve over a wicked world is not weakness or faithlessness; it's the thing Noah and God did together, and it's the thing Moses 7 showed God doing alone. A heart that can still be pained by the world's cruelty is a heart in tune with heaven's. And third — the gospel you have is old, preached by name through every link of a chain that runs back to Adam, and the chain was kept alive across an entire flood by one preserved old man and one obedient family. You are downstream of that preservation. It cost something to get the promise to you.
And the chapter leaves you, finally, with a model of what faith does at the end of an age: it keeps preaching to a world that throws the warning back in its face, it builds the ark it was told to build, and it grieves — really grieves — for the people who won't get in. That's Noah. That's the close of the Book of Moses. Next comes Abraham, and a second telling of where it all began.